Court convicts former interior minister

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22. April 2005 By William Pratt

When he was German interior minister, Manfred Kanther's staff put together a proposal that eventually would lead to fines political parties would have to pay if they failed to meet financial reporting requirements.
But while the work was going on in 1994, Kanther neglected to mention one fact to his staff members: Roughly nine years earlier, he and associates in a state branch of the Christian Democratic Union had taken action to avoid the reach of an earlier party financing law by secretly transferring nearly DM21 million (nearly $14 million today) into Swiss bank accounts.

On Monday, 11 years later, Kanther was ordered to pay a legal price for the dark financial dealings he hushed up while in office. A court in Wiesbaden sentenced the former minister with the law-and-order reputation to a sentence of 18 months probation and a fine of €25,000 ($32,500). In issuing the ruling, the court went beyond the sentence sought by prosecutors, who had demanded that the 65-year-old Kanther pay only a fine of €72,000.

The court also issued a sentence to a second defendant, former CDU financial adviser Horst Weyrauch, that exceeded the penalty sought by prosecutors. The court ordered Weyrauch to pay a fine of €61,200 instead of the €36,000 fine recommended by the prosecution.
Kanther refused to accept the sentence and vowed to appeal the ruling to the Federal Court of Justice. “The criminalization of actions that took place 22 years ago is absurd,“ he said. “I'm confident that the Federal Court of Justice will set things straight.“

Kanther and Weyrauch were sentenced in one of Germany's most sensational political financing scandals. The outlines of that scandal began to show in late 1999.
Soon, even former Chancellor Helmut Kohl was caught up in it. In a television interview, Kohl admitted that he accepted illegal donations of between DM1.5 million and DM2 million between 1993 and 1998. Since then, Kohl has refused to identify the donors, citing the word of honor that he gave them.

Unlike Kanther, Kohl was never tried. Instead, the former chancellor and prosecutors reached a settlement in 2001 under which he paid a fine of DM300,000 for accepting the anonymous donations, and the investigation was dropped.

Kanther's case focused on decisions he made while he was general secretary of the Christian Democrats' branch in the central state of Hesse in 1983. The accounts, which Weyrauch called “the honey pot in the south,“ were used to finance the branch party's activities between 1985 and 1999. In response to the questions raised about the flow of the some money, the Hesse CDU claimed that the money came from legacies from abroad, and one party official said he thought the money might even have come from Jewish contributors.

As the slush-fund scandal swept through the national CDU, Kanther admitted in 2000 that the branch party had held secret accounts abroad. He then resigned from the national parliament.
At first, it appeared that he would not be prosecuted in the case. In 2002, the court in Wiesbaden refused to hear the case, saying the statute of limitations had expired on the case and the party had not been damaged by Kanther's actions. The prosecution appealed the case and won. As a result, the trial began last August before the very same court that had initially refused to hear it.

On Monday, the court said that the party had indeed been damaged by Kanther's actions. The head judge, Rolf Vogel, cited a fine of €21 million that the president of the German parliament assessed in 2000 because the state party had issued false financial reports.
During the trial, prosecutors were unable to determine just where the money had come from. A third defendant in the case, Prince Casimir Sayn-Wittgenstein, once told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung he was no longer sure himself. The former state CDU treasurer, now 88, said during the interview: “We collected donations like a squirrel gathers its winter food stock.“

Because of his poor health, Wittgenstein's case was separated from the main trial.
The chairwoman of the national Christian Democrats, Angela Merkel, had no comment on the decision. But her party's political opponents did. They include Inge Wettig-Danielmayer, the treasurer of the Social Democratic Party, the senior coalition partner in the national government. “With Mr. Kanther, I'm overwhelmed with anger when I remember that he was once German interior minister.“

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